


A not admitting of the wound

by middlemarch



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Angst, Denial, F/M, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Romance, entail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 21:06:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8072740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Cora Crawley was not an indulgent mother.





	

For all that their situations were alike, Mary never felt especially close to her mother. Their fundamental commonality, the unequivocal need to put aside a critical component of the essential self, worked to distance them rather than draw them together. Mary could never quite ignore that subtle disappointment her mother had that she had not a firstborn son, that Mary, squalling sharply like a piglet at the insult of birth and entirely unaware, had forever eradicated that possibility. Granny had made it clear that she forgave Mary for not being the desired heir and gloried in her nonetheless but Cora always withheld something nameless but crucial. Her sisters’ arrival hadn’t engendered the same disappointment and Mary could see how her mother was different with them although she couldn’t ever, _wouldn’t_ ever have pointed it out. For all that the sisters had been born so close together, it had been lonely to grow up as Robert Crawley’s firstborn, guided unsubtly towards a marriage that would allow Mary Josephine Crawley the rank the entail prevented her from taking with her first furious exhalation. Mary was so familiar with putting aside what she longed for that wearing her first set of stays, the tightening of the silk laces and that inexorable push into posture and perfect breathlessness had been easy, had garnered a pleased nod from her mother and Granny’s most indulgent smile at the report, “Of course, it could be no trouble to a Crawley woman, we’re bred for abnegation and chic.” Mary could hardly remember all the things she’d once wanted she had set aside with surgical indifference—to travel in the East, nights full of strangely situated stars, smoky incense, and the scent of the heat the sand reluctantly let go; to learn enough to read Ibsen in Norwegian; to swim naked in Porthluney Cove’s warm water, intimidating to any mermaid. Matthew had seemed like he might be the unprepossessing avenue to her title, a little dull and pedantic and someone to be borne, but somehow, he’d become the dearest dream she must dash against merciless rocks and not let her face show, well, anything at all except the beauty granted to her, an ivory bas-relief. How bright his eyes had become with exasperation, how dark when he tried to question her and had met a Sphinx. He thought he knew her, but he did not understand everything she had denied herself, everything she had accepted; she loved him because he wanted to know, at least for a time. Mary’s mother came to her, again and again, to advise and soothe and gently disparage, but it was futile, as if a village seamstress was called to close a surgical incision. Isis was a greater consolation and to tell her mother so was the greatest. Cora made a show of not understanding but Mary thought she did and was grateful for her eldest daughter’s response, eager then to listen to Edith’s whine, to cheer Sybil in her latest scheme. Mary looked out the window at the acres of the property, a green that needed no comparison to emeralds, precious just as it was, quilted against the house and she imagined a black mare fast enough to gallop beyond any perimeter, off to the horizon, the color of Matthew’s eyes in any mood.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little drabble for everyone missing a new season of Downton Abbey tonight, although it doesn't further the plot in an AU direction; it is a little visit with Mary and Matthew and Cora and I tried to make Violet's cameo suitably incisive. The title is from Emily Dickinson. Mary wishes to swim off the coast of Cornwall. And I got Isis in there too.


End file.
